Apple's new programming language, Swift, was built to improve the way developers built apps for the iPhone and other iOS devices. Today, two years after it was first unveiled this programming language has found a new place on real-world mobile devices. The language has already been adopted at scale by app developers and major companies around the world. According to a recent survey, Swift is now one of the most used programming languages with more than 77% of the developers favoring it over other languages such as C++, Rust, etc.

Apple's newly announced programming language brings a number of benefits and major change in how developers can build apps for the iPhone and iPad. Before now, Apple has been relying on Objective-C, which was built on the foundation of the venerable C programming language, but with Swift, Apple has decided to leave the past behind in favor of a more modern, and developer-friendly coding language.

Apple's Swift Programming Language Soon to Enter Data Centers

iOS's new programming language, Swift, is used to develop apps for mobile devices but today developers want to take this programming language to another level. Their focus is on using the language to support large computer data centers that drive our mobile apps and websites across the Internet. A new version of Swift, named Perfect, has been released that runs not only on the iPhone and other personal devices, but also on computer servers that deliver data and services to these devices.

The idea is that coders can now use Swift to build both a mobile app and the server code that drives the app. For anyone building an app, it is in the best interests to use one language and the same code, at the front end and at the back end. This version of Swift currently runs only on Apple's Mac OS X operating system, and although OS X is occasionally used on servers, this is far from the norm since most servers still run on Windows or Linux.

With Apple now releasing the open source version of Swift, it has freely shared the underpinnings of the language with the world at large. Now any developer around the world can port the language onto other operating systems, including Linux, which dominates the modern data center.

Using Perfect, Swift has been augmented with some extra tools which are needed to deploy and run Swift on the server. The coding world is moving in such a way that soon Swift will end up as a server-side language. More and more coders are using the same language on the server side as they use on the client end. For instance, Node.js lets you build server software in JavaScript, the language originally designed for building applications inside web browsers. Java, not to be confused with JavaScript, is the primary means of building apps on Android phones, and it has today risen to new importance in data centers.

The Future of App Development is Swift

Having an open source version of Swift seems to be extremely meaningful today. The language that drives most iPhone apps today, Objective C, is not open source and for the most part it remains limited to Apple devices. An open source Swift language could grow to compete with other languages on other devices and even inside data centers. This can prove to be boon to the app developer community and programmers at large. The open source version will bring more people to the language that drives apps on the iPhone.

The future aim of the Swift programming language focuses on stability and cross-platform consistency, and further includes:

Core library improvements

An Objective-C legacy, the name space, will finally disappear

Improvements to the Application Binary Interface (ABI) that is the interface between libraries and host operating system

Resilience and portability

Consistency and consolidation of code and standards

So where does all this leave app developers? The answer came with a statement from Tim Cook when he referred to Swift as the "the next big programming language", using which developers will be building apps for "the next 20 years".

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